From the small to the large scale

This week I have been active at all scales: small, citywide and global.

On Tuesday evening it was the small scale: the Eco Energy Fair meeting, where things continue going along. Publicity is starting to loom large and it's still perfectly unclear how it's going to happen, and the grant is still not done, but apart from those tiny details, there are decent hopes that it's going to be a good try.

On Wednesday evening was the (supposedly) citywide scale: the Transition forum meeting. I had a feeling from the days before that it was going to be fine, partly because I knew the Fatherly Figure had tied himself into a knot with his power play of trying to control the account signatories, and partly because I had publicised the email where the whole dirty game was explained and invited a lot of people to come along to the meeting. Under such circumstances, you know that people will be forced to be civil, or sink forever into a hole of their own digging. Fatherly Figure didn't even appear. The people who came were completely reasonable at all times. Things will still be up in the air till October, when supposedly we'll have the Annual General Meeting, but we'll see.

On Tuesday was also the event at global scale: The Oil Drum have published the article about EROEI in my model (my updated version of "Limits to growth"). You can find it here:

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5688

The most interesting conclusion is that we need a policy to push for renewables. If not, even if tomorrow we got a great new renewable source with incredibly high EROEI, people would continue burning fossil fuels because it makes sense in the short term, and climate change will catch everyone by the end of the 21st century.

Charlie Hall loved it and invited me to Syracuse to present it. Unfortunately, Syracuse is at the other side of the Atlantic and the conference is exactly on the same date as the Eco Energy Fair. Oh, well.

Control freaks

Some people are control freaks by nature. They are constantly terrified of the world at large, that keeps being unpredictable and messing about with them.

Fatherly Figure is one such people. He's terrified of the Eco Energy Fair, and he's doing all he can to stop it, including playing dirty. The latest one is about the bank account signatories. They have changed recently, they used to be Treasurer Girl, Buddhist Engineer and Butterfly Man. Since Butterfly Man is only loosely connected to Transition lately and Buddhist Engineer is retiring from Transition, they needed some more. Charming Guy and Fatherly Figure offered to be the ones, then Hyperlogical Man offered as well. And now Fatherly Figure has turned round and said that Hyperlogical Man isn't allowed to be a signatory, Charming Guy agrees and Treasurer Girl is kind of going along with it.

This is incredibly ugly. The next forum meeting is going to be a mess.

Furiously networking for the Fair

This week has been again dominated by the Energy Fair, with some crazy networking going on.

On Tuesday we had the Energy Group meeting, when we saw face to face for the first time the new volunteer that is going to deal with event logistics, the Old Roadie. He sounds like a terrific guy, coming from a rock&roll background and talking about triphasic electricity with scary familiarity. He also sounds like he's got a lot of useful contacts. We'll see where he takes us.

On Wednesday I went to a networking event that was supposed to put small businesses in touch with green consultants, or something like it. A lot of people were neither representing a business or a green consultant, but hey. I made four useful contacts for the Energy Fair: two green companies, a photographer, and an ethical events company. We'll find out if anything good comes out of that.

Some other contacts have been made all round, and the Fatherly Figure is now making a cautious turnabout. We'll see.

Energy Fair blues

This week was supposed to be when I spent as much time as possible working on the houseboat. It hasn't happened. With one thing and another, I have only done some small progress in building the computer table, and that's about it. Instead, I've spent most of the time firefighting the Energy Fair.

On Tuesday we had the publicity meeting for the Energy Fair. It went well, and we now have a proper marketing plan. There was only one little cloud on the horizon: people where saying that Fatherly Figure had sent a nasty email as a reply to the one I sent when I forwarded to the whole team a grant application. When I went back and checked, he was saying all sorts of unpleasant things, like there are only 10 active members in Transition. Which is about true (slightly pessimistic, but true) but the last thing you want is people from the Council hearing of it, and they received the email as well. I have spent the rest of the week sending emails back and forth, trying to contain the damage. I think by now I've made it, but I'm exhausted.

On Wednesday I had lunch with Charming Guy, which has been the first time I have had a chance to have a long talk with him. We talked about the firefighting I was doing and more general issues, like why things come to this. He was of the school of thought: "It's all your fault for putting off people", while I was telling him they were more systemic issues, like communication channels all screwed up. There are obviously three cliques going on: the Energy Group, the Food Group and the Cafe Lot, who meet every Tuesday morning in a cafe. Most of the most active members (Fatherly Figure, Charming Guy, Buddhist Engineer) are part of the Cafe Lot, but I'm not, because I work full time. By the end, he could see that I had a point. Hopefully, this will build some bridges.

And my boat, of course, is still a mess. Got distracted partly trying to fix the laptop of a guy that promised me to paint my boat in exchange for fixing his laptop, so I suppose I have a little excuse. But I really have to find the time to get things done, don't know how.

The different meanings of "energy"

"Energy" is a word that means different things for different people. This week has been looking at energy in all their meanings.

Energy can mean that thing that feeds all your gadgets, from the smallest iPod to the largest house. On Tuesday we had a meeting on the Eco Energy Fair that will deal with energy in that sense. Things are still chugging along, but other things also related to that same energy are distracting people: most of the Energy Group (not me, I was working) also went to talk on Friday with this guy of the local energy company to discuss how to get some windmills in the area.

Energy can also mean enthusiasm, which was notably lacking on the forum meeting on Wednesday. It was literally four of us, and dominated by the Charming Guy who obviously just wanted this meeting done and over with as soon as possible.

Energy can also be that thing that makes the world go round, the secret of the rise and fall of civilizations. I recently got an email from the wonderful Italian guy asking me a question about my updated "Limits to growth" model: what if the claims that high altitude wind power has extraordinarily high EROEI are true? Are we saved? I ran my model, and the answer, surprisingly, is "NO!" In the model, just having a wonderful energy source is not enough. Market forces are still conservative and people continue using fossil fuels because they're still an acceptable business. So climate change continues unabated, food production becomes harder and harder, and at the end of the 21st century, the whole of civilization collapses catastrophically.

This actually makes a much stronger case for the article I was going to publish in The Oil Drum, that looked at different aspects of EROEI in my model, and ended with the interesting discovery that the best strategy isn't to hope for better EROEI of any energy source, but just go for renewables like crazy, whether the EROEI is good or not. If we do that, there will be a bump in the road soon with peak oil and gas, but we'll get over it. I have sent the corrected article, and stay tuned for when it's published.

Finally, energy can mean your desire to do something. I have given myself a week of holiday to sort out my houseboat, and I completely lack the energy to do it. But it's the low-level anxiety of knowing that it's rusting from the inside that will make me do something.

Gaps

This week has been a reflection on gaps, or blind spots, or the nothing, or whatever you want to call stuff that's missing and nobody even wants to bother noticing is missing.

On Monday there was supposedly a Transport Group meeting but nobody came, or more accurately, I arrived late with the Mad Scientist and there was nobody else there. Somebody obviously ought to do something about having a functioning Transport Group, but that would require admitting that there is a gap there, and the Fatherly Figure will just not contemplate that.

Yesterday I met the Buddhist Engineer, who has made it quite clear that he doesn't want to be involved in Transition stuff any more. I returned to him the books that he lent me and we talked about general Transition things, for example the fact that he was being a bridge between the two main Transition cliques, and that's going to leave a fairly big gap when he goes. He also showed me an email by the Fatherly Figure claiming that I go around making decisions without telling anybody, which is the second one that I know of this month and it only proves the gaps in his knowledge and his memory.

And all along the week, the Energy Fair activity has been chugging along, with gaps appearing at various corners, most notably that only Hyperlogical Man is contacting companies and somebody else will have to help, and that we still have nobody to arrange the logistics of the event. But apart from those little holes in the plan, everything is working beautifully.

I have this crazy idea that if you stare at a gap long enough, something will come out of the hole and fill it. But it only happens if you look at it. If you ignore it, the gap grows larger and larger until it eats up the world.

Organizing, coordinating, communicating

I have been so busy lately that I haven't found the time to write my trusty blog. On top of that, for some reason my wireless went and then the whole electricity of my boat went as well, and I was incommunicado for a weekend! My boat is now happily connected to a different socket and my electricity bill cleared up, but there was some anguish at one point.

The two things that have kept me busy are organizing the Energy Fair and the organizing workshop.

The organizing workshop was yesterday and it was a flop. Only a dozen people said they would come, and of that dozen, only six actually came. It reminded me of the story of that wonderful medicine to improve memory in elderly people, that never worked because the patients kept forgetting to take it! People said the workshop itself was interesting, in spite of spending most of the time listening to the sound of their own voice. If they had spent just a little bit more time listening to the actual content of the workshop, they might have learned something more. But you can't get very far with only six people.

On the other hand, it was good enough that I thought it could be taken as a pilot for the real thing, that could be done in September. I will start floating baloons on that as soon as I have a report on the workshop written to whet people's appetite.

The Energy Fair, on the other hand, is chugging along nicely. We have discovered that marketing guys are like buses: you can't find any and then three appear at once. We also have a new girl to look at the money issues, which will take a big load from my shoulders. Hyperlogical Man has been doing his usual thing of stubbornly doing what he thinks needs to be done, forgetting all sorts of considerations at the sides. I'm left to sweep after him and deal with the things he doesn't look at. But with some guiding (which in his case means pushing like hell), I think he can actually be pretty good.

Organizing is hard work, but it produces some results sometimes.